Dom Lagana’s best pass of the weekend in CatSpot dragster still comes up short

NORWALK, Ohio (June 24) — Dom Lagana and crew chief John Stewart dialed up a great combination for their CatSpot Organic Cat Litter Top Fuel dragster in the opening round of the Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Nationals Sunday morning, but his weekend-best pass of 3.837 at 323.89 mph still wasn’t enough to upset top qualifier Clay Millican, who blazed to a 3.759 at 332.26 mph.

“We finally got the car down the track,” Lagana said. “We are still lacking some power, which has really been our problem all along. What happens is the car doesn’t have the power to wear enough clutch and it just makes the tune-up more aggressive than we want. Still, we made a good step in the right direction today.”

Part of the problem for Lagana was the fact that professional qualifying was shortened to just two sessions by rain showers that hung over the area Friday and Saturday. That left him 16th on the grid.

“We didn’t qualify well so we got the unfortunate draw of running Clay in Round 1,” he said. “We figured he would either run really well like he did or smoke the tires. This time he went 3.75, so he beat us straight up. At least we kept them honest.

“We’re about as happy as you can be after a loss. We just need to do a little more homework and see if we can find our power problem.”

After four straight weekends of racing, the Mello Yello NHRA Series takes a weekend off before returning to action July 6-8 in Epping, N.H.

“I think it will be a little warmer up there so I don’t think you’ll see a lot of 3.70s but we’ll see what happens,” Lagana said. “The good news is we can build off this run today and we have a weekend off to analyze our data and assess everything. We’ll keep working at it and take our chances in Epping.”